Scaling Rails Applications has been a good topic over internet so far. From Jonathan Boutelle’s Barcamp Bangalore 2 session, had a good overview of how folks at Slideshare did it. It has been wounderfully architected with use of Amazon S3.

Twitter is Evan William’s newest product. Moreover, Twitter is this years success story. With millions of twits from millions of users, it has been reported that is struggling to scale. David posted couple of thuoghts over this issues in general last week.

Today evening I stumbled upon this wonderful slideshow on scaling rails. It has been created by Blaine Cook who works for Twitter.

Please find Slideshare scaling doc below

The douments like this really helped me rearranging my thoughts a lot. You guys rock!

I was trying to submit a story to Netscape and saw a link to upload videos. It was interesting. Netscape now allows you to upload your own videos to the portal. Netscape had already started some syndicated video features back in 2006.

Recently, many memediggers, including Digg had added video memedigging functionalities to their sites. But netscape allows you to upload the entire video (max limit 150MB) to be uploaded. Currently supported formarts are mpg, .mpeg, .mov, .avi, .mp4, .wmv *, or .m4v file. There is no limit on the number of videos you can upload. Just like YouTube, the format which the videos are displayed is flash. Netscape really want to build it’s own YouTube.

Till this moment I am not able find any open videos.

It is happening again - this time worse. Amazon/Alexa is trying to shut down Statsaholic (formerly Alexaholic) by blocking the Alexa graphs. Statsaholic is a multiple site traffic comparison service that became popular lately for Seth Godin’s web 2.0 picks.

Statsholic responds in this way:

David vs. Goliath - On March 18, in response to legal action taken against me by Alexa over the use of their name in my domain alexaholic.com, I changed the name of this website to Statsaholic. Now, on March 23, Amazon/Alexa is still trying to shut this website down, this time by blocking their traffic graphs if you’re viewing them from this site (even though thousands of other websites, and Alexa’s own free widgets, serve their traffic graphs in exactly the same manner). I’m doing my best to keep the site up with some creative coding, but it’s not looking good for the little guy here. If you see a white box where the graph should be, that’s Alexa blocking us again. It appears that the decision makers at Amazon think mashups and creative use of their api is fine, unless you get successful with it.

The last point seems very true. Statsholic had started the comprehensive trafic comparison features much before Alexa itself (using Alexa’s own data). But it seems like Amazon’s API’s are not as open as they advertise it to be.

RIght now no clarification is available from Alexa / Amazon regarding this issue.

Update: It seems like Statsaholic wants to switch to other traffic data providers. Compete.com and Quantcast.com have already shown interest in providing their data.

Yes. Micheal Arrington’s Techcrunch is celebrating it’s 1st birthday. In one year it got into top blogs lists of many blog tracking services. Steve “Persuasion” Rubel has posted a nice post including traffic details of TechCrunch here.

The unique advantage of TC is in it’s focus. Micheal carefully showcases technologies and people (which makes great companies) who are going to transform our lives tomorrow. TC really had created a cool geek community which otherwise would have scattered around Myspace clones.

I really liked the way he had handled Edgeio. Even if its his baby and its a start of a new era (Yes Yes Microformats search), he had launched it normally; without misusing his fame or subscription power.

I say thumbs up to Micheal Arrington.

digg.com is down. Their maintenance page looks simple and cool. Click on the photo to see larger version.

Newly launched Trendio.com is the first stock exchange on headline news. Register, bid for your favorite words and watch what you earn. It is an interesting and simple online game.

One may get $1000 for referring friends. Here is my referral link
http://www.trendio.com/en/ref.php?id=217
I have just added some money to Krishna ’s account.

Just like real stock market, Trendio encourage competion. You get more money, you win. When somebody smarter comes then you lose. And the criteria of making more money is your “news sensitivity” and ability to predict news. I see good future in players in this “Get smarter, win big” game arena.

Via TechCrunch

I am always curious about “where this web 2.0 guys are from”. Web 2.0 Innovation Map from Furio maps geographical locations of more than 200 Web 2.0 startups. But, where in heavens the indian startups like Riya and PixRat are mapped?

BarCamp Bangalore is starting from tomorrow. Pooran is encouraging me to show up but I do not have the ticket yet

In The Wisdom of Browse, Derek is exploring how a group of people can be stupid and useless if not directed in proper way.

People are stupid in groups. Think about popularity for a moment. You know what the most popular TV show of all time is? Baywatch – a show with the primary distinguishing feature of slow-motion shots of Pamela Anderson in a swimsuit running down a beach. Think about mob behavior and our basest instincts. Think about the prom king and queen. If we learned anything in high school, it’s that there’s no better way for the crap to rise to the top than a popularity contest.

People are brilliant in groups. Crowds can also be wise. The famous example is to ask a group of people to guess the number of coins in a jar. Any single individual’s answer will most likely be wrong. But if you take all the answers and average them together, most of the time, they’re right (give or take a percent or two). Groups are also the foundation of democracy, which, for all it’s problems, is pretty much a great thing.

With the example of Digg, he is pointing out how a social network can get a mob behavior. The best example is when the Digg vs O’Reilly controversy broke out (Later, there came an explanation in Digg itself. But the wound was soo deep to heal).

I have always been positive about the Karma system in social networks. A “good guy” must be marked as a good guy by the network. Otherwise the value of being a good is lost.

David Heinemeier Hansson has announced Rails 1.1, newest version of the much beloved web development framework Ruby on Rails.

Rails 1.1 comes with brand new features like RJS, Active Record++, respond_to and as David puts it, 500 other things. Great!